Medium: Sculpture

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Passionateprintmaker : Stacey D. Miller Artist Statement Immersion in Emotion “The Bottle Series” When you can create art, to me, it becomes an obligation. I create my art to inspire thought in a society where it has become impossible to think out loud. We can not avoid what we see, and regardless of how touchy the subject is you won’t find many people today who are afraid to stare. Since I don’t really preconceive ideas I can honestly say that the majority of my artwork is spontaneous. While it would be nice to say that I get most of my inspiration from artists like Salvador Dali or Kenny Scharf it would not be very accurate. The one major influence I see in my work I attribute to my former mentor, master ceramist Don Poole, whom I spent my first five years of art apprenticing under. There are some popular artists that inspire me but most of my influence comes from normal people, artist I work with, print/ electronic media, hardships, things that are down to earth and real. I don’t spend enough time around dead artisans to be influenced by them. When I started the first work of the series “Coming to Life” I had been trying to find a way to relate my life experiences to other people while still being non-objective enough to relate to anyone. When we introduce people in artworks it raises many questions about the subject. By using inanimate objects, like the bottles, in place of people it gives the viewer a chance to observe the story expressed in the artwork by applying it to themselves. I didn’t want to keep people from feeling what the art was expressing. I want my bottles to walk out of the artwork, alive and with intensity, and I choose my media and style selectively to assure I achieved this purpose. The only constant connection in my series is the repetition of the bottles and you will find that, just like people, the bottles all express themselves differently in style and representation. I choose to use bottles in place of people because there are so many of them. There are bottles that have feminine lines, and distinct masculine curves. There is often something that I find phallic and/or voluptuous about the bottles that I choose. While I feel most comfortable working with print media, for this series, I did not want to let my medium limit the expression of the art. The same could be said about the styles of art that show through the work of this versatile series. For instance in “The Outsider I” I chose to use thick, impressionistic mark making, and expression of oil pastel because I wanted the viewer to feel the intensity of being looked upon as different. I wanted the observer to understand the glow that comes from finding optimism in your weakest link. I could not express the virtue of the outsiders story with smooth oil paint and realism, it just would not provide the right emotion and energy of existence that I was looking for. When I do series work I have a focused intensity about me. My art becomes like oxygen and I find that I am most steady when I am consumed by it. After I had created the first few pieces of this series, it seemed as though I no longer needed motivation. Relaxation became what I sought and I found it while pouring myself onto canvas. The bottles became a release for all my stresses. I would only hope that the people who come to observe these works can relate to them in the same fashion that I always will. Stressing experiences in life effect us all no matter what our differences may be.